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Although End User Computing (EUC) applications provide significant benefits allowing the users to control and manipulate data, it presents numerous challenges for businesses, including distributed computing and disaggregation and increasing complexity among several others. Synchronet, a technology consulting firm, helps businesses to develop and employ a modern, adaptable, and productive workforce, with its expansive understanding of EUC. Being a prime Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Consulting Partner, Synchronet helps businesses to leverage the EUC benefits of AWS. In this interview, Darin Cook, the CEO, Michael Wilk, the COO, and Mike Hapner, the CTO of Synchronet discuss how the company develops and applies its expertise in delivering the very best in AWS WorkSpaces, AppStream, and WorkDocs solutions.
How have you evolved and positioned yourself as a leader in the Amazon landscape?
As we began building our AWS consulting practice in early 2017, we began to realize that we needed to have a clear, what AWS calls as a “superpower,” to differentiate ourselves within the AWS partner community when we are working with customers. We needed to be able to say that we were the best at deploying and operating a particular technology of AWS versus trying to spread ourselves across multiple disciplines. Therefore, we looked at our capabilities, our experiences in the kind of infrastructure we had built in the past, and the projects we had handled. This led us to settle on the EUC space. The EUC space consists of three different products from AWS—WorkSpaces, AppStream 2.0, and WorkDocs. We have leveraged some of the automation capabilities we developed over the last couple of years, alongside our previous GDI infrastructure experience, to create a differentiated offering. This is how we have evolved and arrived at our focus.
What inspired you to choose to build your solution portfolio based on AWS, out of the several other competitors?
There are two aspects to be noted. The first is the experience: Synchronet began to get individuals certified and then received a partnership; nearly everyone in our company is certified in some capacity, with Amazon.
Synchronet recognized earlier than many other services organizations that, the cloud, in general, is real and Amazon in particular, is the leader and would continue to be the leader in the landscape. The ability to create a differentiated offering for the marketplace on AWS is easier to do. AWS supplies more tools to build the kind of engine that we want, in comparison to the other cloud providers that give different types of engines to purchase versus purchasing a platform as a service (PaaS). We chose the collection of toolsets inside of the AWS product portfolio that would allow us to build platforms. We would not be able to have a high level of control and automation capability in other platforms.
Could you walk us through your AWS offerings, in terms of their overall implementations?
As an advanced consulting partner, we have executed several projects from an innovation standpoint, which allowed us to build an excellent relationship with Amazon.
The focus is to work with AWS partners to ensure that the end user gets a good AWS experience
AppStream is also one of our specialized implementations. Streaming applications is not a new technology; however, organizations are adopting them in new ways as they start to migrate into the public cloud arena. We are taking not only the historically streamed applications but also taking applications that have been running on-premises and presenting them to the end user community in different ways, using products like AppStream.
A specific example would be of one of our customers that do data processing. In the past, when they would start a process with a set of data, they were limited to one process at a time, based on the computer systems that they had. If they had one computer, they would start the process, and had to stop some other task while that process was consuming the resources of their local system. With AppStream, we can move that processing into the cloud and allow the knowledge worker to launch multiple processes at the same time, thus increasing their productivity by 200 or even 300 percent based on how many processes they chose to run at the same time.
When we look at the possibility of including the WorkDocs, AppStream, and WorkSpaces, we can enable essentially the next generation of knowledge worker use an enterprise managed architected windows desktop on their choice of device. We see that millennial workforce desire to leverage their own personalized equipment, and still interface with their corporate controls and security measures that are in place for a large enterprise. We foresee the need for meeting their demands of a change of workforce, while still having controls and the necessary management tools in place.
How does the roadmap for Synchronet look like?
We will continue to focus on the EUC aspects of our business, creating more advancement with our automation tools. We will also continue to fortify our strategy; we work directly with customers, to support their EUC initiatives, but we also do so, with other AWS partners. That is what we call our indirect strategy. Because we are so focused on EUC, we don’t present a competitive threat for most of AWS partner community. We can augment them by coming in and supporting the partner in an end-user compute engagement with one of their customers. We shall evolve both in our direct and indirect strategies. The focus is to work with AWS partners to ensure that the end user gets a good AWS experience.
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